Mentoring middle school teachers in SD through PBL
System Dynamics and Project Based Learning
Some background
Steve Roderick
The Concord Consortium
“We’re a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating innovative educational technology for STEM learning. Our pioneering work brings technology’s promise into reality for education worldwide.”
Want to know more? Go to www.concord.org
Curricular �tools
SageModeler
Curricular mentoring
Working side by side with teachers to help them modify and enhance what they already do well, and expanding upon it to include,
Interconnection and Causality
Student generated behavior over time data - PBL
Stocks and flows.
What is accumulating and why?
Feedback
Model creation, discussion, and rework
Can we bring all of this to the curriculum?
First meeting with a middle school Earth Science teacher
Teacher’s initial learning goals:
Previous success with Mini-Cooper analogy and wanted to build on it.
Create a model to explain:
“Why does the inside of a car gets so hot on a sunny day?”
The goal of the activity was for students, with support, to make the connection between the Mini-Cooper model and a model of the Earth.
Can we bring all of this to the curriculum?
Interconnection and Causality
Student generated behavior over time data - PBL
Stocks and flows.
What is accumulating and why?
Feedback
Model creation, discussion, and rework
Interconnection and Causality
Question: Why does the inside of a car gets so hot on a sunny day?
“How can we make this more engaging?” -teacher
Creating an initial SageModeler diagram
Interconnection and Causality
Attempts to match original diagram
Thinking linearly. A one way flow of energy.
Includes temperature and mediating factors like clouds and windows. Also shows some understanding of feedback.
Students share and discuss their models.
Teacher learns a little about students’ background understanding.
The models give a nice sense of student thinking about system structure, but they are static.��“Can we investigate what might happen over time?”
Student generated behavior over time data - PBL
Behavior over time
Question: Why does the inside of a car gets so hot on a sunny day?
Project Based Learning
Project Based Learning (PBL) is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world and personally meaningful projects.
The students were given access to materials and CODAP, a data collection and analysis software program, then challenged to create an experiment that would mimic what was going on in the Mini-Cooper example.
Several groups of students designed similar experiments to record temperature change over time within a glass jar.
Before running the experiment, students were asked to predict what they would see as results.
Predicted results Experimental results
Stocks and Flows
Stocks and flows.
What is accumulating and why?
Question of what is accumulating, and what causes accumulation to happen, leads to discussion of stocks and flows.
inflow
outflow
stock
inflow
outflow
stock
Feedback
Modeled vs. experimental data
Why the difference?
Feedback
When simulated, the model looks a lot like what the students predicted, but not like the experimental results.
Simulation results Experimental results
Right now the only thing controlling how fast heat radiates from the car are the open windows.
Wouldn’t more heat energy in the car lead to more molecular collisions with the air and more heat escaping?
A full class discussion of the model and simulation results raises some interesting questions.
Feedback added
“All models are wrong, some are useful”� -- George Box
The data don’t match perfectly, but it is useful to know that feedback can have a significant impact upon system behavior.
Can we bring all of this to the curriculum?
Interconnection and Causality
Student generated behavior over time data - PBL
Stocks and flows.
What is accumulating and why?
Feedback
Model creation, discussion, and rework
What’s next?
For the students:
1. The opportunity to bring these ideas, along with new tools, skills, and perspectives, to the work they do in all of their classes.
2. Applying what they have learned in this small set of activities to the global issues surrounding climate change.
For the teacher:
1. Using what they have learned and experienced to foster engagement and new understandings for all of their students and in all units across the curriculum.
2. New ways of understanding their subject area.
3. New approaches to assessing student learning?
What have I learned while mentoring?
Mentoring about systems often involves helping teachers think differently about what they teach.��Mentoring remotely is not as successful as being with the teacher during planning and execution.��Mentoring about dynamic systems takes time. ����Teachers value and appreciate the chance to work cooperatively toward an important goal.�
Though Dynamic Thinking is one of the easiest of the systems thinking skills to master, it does not come naturally for most people.” -- Barry Richmond
My students have made amazing progress and working with you has had a huge impact on me gaining confidence with systems.
-- anonymous teacher
The End
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